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DISCUSSION Conclusion #1 The proposed area .readily fulfills the criteria of historical and cultural significance. It is an example of upper middle-class housing built by second generation of South Bend merchants, manufacturers and politicians, often being - the sons and daughters of South Bend's, most influential pioneers, including one of South Bend's founders, Lathrop M. Taylor. It has also remained a coherent, compact collection of buildings reflective of a specific era in South Bend development. The first extant houses in the district were constructed circa 1882 with.the majority of the structures in this neighborhood being built between 1890 and 1910. With the exception, of a, few demolitions, the area was built -out to its present composition by 1925. These houses with a few duplex residences, the Salvation Army building, one commercial storefront building and.a °church remain as a cohesive neighborhood that is much the same as when the area was developed. As a group, the structures are suitable for preservation because of their cohesiveness and similarity in age, materials and arrangement on the landscape: Retaining the' entire neighborhood intact heightens the area's educational utility, especially into the future as other neighborhoods of this era become interspersed with newer and unsympathetic structures and alterations to the buildings in them. If protected, the neighborhood will remain for future generations to study as an example of a specific time and way of life that has almost disappeared. Historical Development This area was originally a stretch of empty land between the Michigan road and a residential area to the east stretching south of the Birdsell plant (built 1872) between the old Grand Trunk Railroad tracks on Division and Carroll Street. This field was owned by .South Bend pioneer, Colonel Lathrop M. Taylor, joint founder with Alexis Coquillard of South Bend and one of the City's important early merchants. Taylor's Field was an 90 acre "oak barren" purchased by the Colonel from the federal Government in the late 1830's as an investment. The large empty area was often used into the 1890's as.a place for circuses and menageries to set up their shows. The Colonel died in 1887, having lived the final years of his life in the home of his daughter, Mary Taylor Nicar, who soon after built the first house (c.1890) in what was also called by local residents, "Taylor's Block". After Lathrop Taylor's death, his heirs, daughters, Eliza Wall and Mary Nicar, son Thaddeus and various spouses, began subdividing the field for sale and development. The new subdivision (Taylor's Field First Addition, 1893) soon became a middle-class neighborhood. By 1905 both S. St. Joseph Street and the west side of Carroll Street had a collection of substantial homes designed in styles generally called Queen Anne and American Four -Squares.